Medication carts in general are well-known. Such carts generally comprise a body or housing which is supported on wheels such that the cart can be readily maneuvered throughout a hospital or similar facility. The cart housing will typically include a plurality of individual medication bins housed in one or more cassette containers. The bins are assigned to particular patients (patient-specific), or contain particular medications (drug-specific) not assigned to a particular patient. If the individual bins are assigned to patients, there will often be an inefficient use of space in the bin, since prescribed medications for many patients will not require the space of an entire bin. In other cases, large dosage forms or multiple-day patient medications can require more than one bin for a single patient.
Medication carts also typically will have large miscellaneous drawers for storage of containers of particular medications, such as aspirin, syrups, etc. Non-medication supplies are also kept in the miscellaneous drawers. In all cases, the nurse must find and then pick the correct amount of the correct medications and/or supplies within the bin. Inventory management is imprecise because the nurse may take too few or too many doses or misplace doses which are returned to the cart.
This lack of dosing and inventory management leads to medication dosing errors. In addition, there are errors in the manual dispensing of medications into the bins by the pharmacy, and there is no closed-loop monitoring control over medications in the cart, the pharmacy and/or the nursing stations.
Also, such medication carts are typically inconvenient to access. The cart may have locked doors which require keys or other controlled means of access. Further, when the doors are opened, the entire medication cart, including all of the bins, is often accessible, instead of just the desired patient's bin or particular medications. This allows "borrowing" of medications from another bin, mistakes and even theft. Access to the bins is also in many cases physically inconvenient because of the operator having to bend over or kneel to access desired bins and drawers.
Hence, it would be desirable to have a medication cart which is more efficient, easily accessible and more convenient to use. In addition, it would be helpful to be able to conveniently limit access to a single unit of use in one desired bin to prevent errors and theft.